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Best Books of 2005?
Did anyone see the New York Times' list of the "10 Best Books of 2005"?
The Non-Fiction list makes sense to me (TPM Book Club alum George Packer's The Assassin's Gate, Joan Didion's fine The Year of Magical Thinking, and the Tony Judt's bracing Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 are my particular favorites), but the Fiction list seems a bit off (Prep?!?! Or the disappointingly self-satisfied Saturday? ). So, before I start my holiday shopping, I was hoping the readers of TPMCafe could help me out and tell me some of their favorite books of 2005.
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I love looking back and thinking about my favorite books of the year. Here are a couple books that I couldn't put down and didn't want to end:
In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat by Rick Atkinson. Atkinson recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his WWII book An Army at Dawn and, in a sense, this is a great follow up book. During the Iraqi War, Atkinson gets embedded with Major General Petraeus of the 101st Airborne (whose had made noise recently as the commander in charged of training Iraqi forces). In the Company of Soldiers is a chronicle of the lives of the men who lead in battle. Of everything that happens, it's the little things (like deciding whether to tape or paint Apache blades to protect from the sand) that make this book a great read for anyone interested in what happened on the group in 2003.
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground by Robert Kaplan is a military travelogue of experiences with US Special Forces teams and Marine units around the world. Much of the book actually takes place during combat in Iraq but only the last chapters in the book have anything to do with it. Instead, Kaplan treks around the globe visiting some of the most remote US military outposts in an attempt to understand the men who are the face of the United States to many people in war-torn corners. The more I read the more I wanted to read and the harder it became to put down. This is the first in a series of books about the US military and I very much look forward to the next (even if The New Yorker didn't much care for this one).
December 4, 2005 11:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
4-Dec-05
Books
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, A Jouney through Yugoslavia, Rebecca West; Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy. cleve
December 4, 2005 11:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest. Not literary, but well-written and fun.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765313081/qid=1133727529/sr=8-1
/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-8116367-7807333?n=507846&s=books&v=glan
ce
December 4, 2005 12:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow, all this highbrow stuff. I wonder what a similar list for right wingers would look like. Liberals Suck!, and Hillary Clinton Analyzed: As Ruthless As Hitler, as Liberal as Marx, and Elitist Democrats Hate America!
would, I'm sure, be the types of titles you'd see over there. One side promulgates literature that is entirely propagandistic and aimed at common people; the other has next to no propaganda at all, and its most able propagandists, people like Michael Moore, are quickly demonized. Strange how that happens....
Anyway, for some more accessible picks, Harry Turtledove, Drive To The East and End Of The Beginning.
They are fiction, and hardly heavy duty fiction, but they are also thoughtful, well-written books with political undertones, and Turtledove writes so that common people will enjoy, and be interested in, what he has to say.
December 4, 2005 1:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here are six of the best (in no particular order) I've seen in the last couple months -- links to very brief reviews of each:
The Devil's Game by Robert Dreyfuss
Postwar by Tony Judt
America's Constitution by Akhil Reed Amar
Henry Adams and the Making of America by Garry Wills
Universe edited by Martin Rees
Shortchanged by Howard Karger
December 4, 2005 2:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
This is an alternate history novel told by a woman living in the middle of a system of great evil. She was born into in this system, and although she is a victim of it, cannot see the full dimensions of the darkness in which she and her society are structurally enmeshed. Even those who struggle to ameliorate the evil are strongly contaminated by it, and they cannot see that about themselves.
This book made me think about the evil in the history that we DO live in, and how much that we take for granted will someday perhaps be seen as monstrous and cruel. Not necessarily the things that people rail against now.
December 4, 2005 4:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not released this year but that's when I got to them.
Metafictional but way cool:
House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
Romantic and powerful:
In the Time Of Our Singing, by Richard Powers
Non-Fiction
The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki
Must-read for students of the mind, society, and government.
December 4, 2005 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Reading everyone else's items, I feel like a bit of an idiot, but I'll have a go anyway. I recently read these two books and really enjoyed them:
Garlic & Sapphires by Ruth Reichl
The Commitment by Dan Savage (The Kid, an older book of his, is also very good)
December 4, 2005 6:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
One I just finished today:
No god but God by Resa Aslan
It's a general survey of Islam, and an argument for reform. The book is in some ways an apologetic. In any case, Mr. Aslan is an exceptionally clear writer and his prose is lively.
December 4, 2005 9:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
William Pfaff’s The Bullet’s Song was a brief but fascinating survey of the curious and often complicit relationship writers, romantics, artists and adventurers had in shaping some of the great 20th century political mythologies. There’s a chapter on figures like nationalist Italian poet Gabriel D’Annunzio, T.E. Lawrence, Andre Malraux, William Munzenberg, Arthur Koestler, etc. The 20th century blur between artistic ideation, political terror, and romantic utopian vision is a rich one to consider.
I’m also in the middle of reading Diarmid McCullough’s The Reformation, which Josh Micah Marshall recommended on his blog earlier this year, and is a brilliantly written account of what to me was one of the most confusing but most politically influential periods in western history.
December 5, 2005 6:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
The best book of fiction I read this year was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I liked it much better than her earlier book, Housekeeping. It's neither long not plot-driven, but it is thought-provoking in a very satisfying way. I am not a religious person, and I have read profiles of Robinson that talk about how her evangelical faith is central to her work. If I had read those articles before reading Gilead, I never would have moved on to the book. I'm glad I read it, though, because it isn't polemical. Yet it raises lots of questions about how beliefs shape identity.
December 5, 2005 8:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, there you have it, Kate--virtually no one, it seems, reads fiction anymore. Maybe it's going the way of poetry, chivalry, and mnemosyne. In fact, as one whose job it is to know, this year was a particularly lackluster one for fiction. (GILEAD was a 2004 title, BTW.) The one standout novel I would mention is Luis Alberto Urrea's THE HUMMINGBIRD'S DAUGHTER, and that only for the first half, which is a hallucinogenically vivid epic of revolutionary Mexico (it eventually devolves into a supernatural tale of increasing interiority and, to me, decreasing interest). I would send three messages in a bottle, however, for three story collections that are golden: 1) Eric Puchner's MUSIC THROUGH THE FLOOR, which detail West Coast lives with an almost grandiose but unaffected human wisdom. 2) Yiyun Li's A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS, which captures China's feverish and catastrophic case of modernity with a vast breadth of storytelling art. And 3) most of all, Shalom Auslander's criminally neglected BEWARE OF GOD, a theologically enraged batch of stories from a backslid Orthodox Jew that had me collapsing in tearful laughter on the A train and generally making an embarrassing spectacle of myself. It's coming in paperback in March, and if there are any gods left out there, it will be a breakout bestseller.
December 6, 2005 6:49 AM | Reply | Permalink